A printed t-shirt is a cheap garment carrying an expensive right. Most of what determines its price, its print run and its availability happens in the licensing agreement rather than in the factory.
The blank is a commodity
Blank t-shirts are produced at enormous scale by a small number of manufacturers, and the cost differences between weights and cuts are modest.
Printing adds a small amount per unit, varying with the method and the number of colours, and falls sharply with run length.
Which means the difference between an inexpensive printed tee and an expensive one is almost never the shirt or the ink.
Rights are the actual product
Band imagery, film stills, artwork, sports marks and character designs are all owned, and using them requires a licence with defined terms.
Licences specify territory, duration, product categories, minimum guarantees and a royalty on each unit sold, all negotiated before anything is printed.
A minimum guarantee commits the licensee to pay regardless of sales, which pushes them to order enough units to justify the deal.
Terms explain the print runs
A short licence period forces a licensee to sell through quickly, so quantities are set against what can move in that window.
When a licence expires, remaining stock often cannot legally be sold, which is why designs vanish abruptly rather than being discounted.
Renewals are not guaranteed, and a rights holder moving to a different partner ends a product line without any change in demand.
Unlicensed printing is a persistent problem
Print-on-demand platforms made small-scale infringement trivial, since a design can be listed without any inventory or upfront cost.
Rights holders respond with takedowns and monitoring, but the volume makes enforcement a continuous process rather than a solvable one.
Legitimate licensees carry the cost of that competition, since an infringing seller has no royalty to pay and can undercut on price indefinitely.
Streetwear built its own version
Independent labels avoid the licensing structure by printing original artwork, which they own outright and can reprint whenever they choose.
Collaborations reintroduce it in a different form, where two brands agree terms over each other's marks for a defined release.
The commercial logic is identical: the garment is a carrier, and what is being sold is permission to display something people want associated with themselves.